Warpaint: ‘David Bowie’s death inspired our new album’

Warpaint have revealed that David Bowie’s death helped inspire their recent album ‘Heads Up’.

The band claim that the record took shape a day after the icon’s death in January.

Singer Emily Kokal told Beats One’s Julie Adenuga: “David Bowie had died the day before, and we went into the studio and listened to David Bowie and built our studio out of our practice space.

“We took our practice space and started making it something to record in. It was a great way to enter the studio because it was such a celebration of somebody who was so prolific and such an ever-changing artist. I think that set the tone for what became ‘Heads Up’.”

Mick ‘Woody’ Woodmansey played with Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars from 1970-1973.

Ahead of the release of his new memoir about the period, Spiders From Mars: My Life With David Bowie on November 3, the drummer spoke to NME to recall receiving Bowie’s approval to tour a tribute show to Bowie’s ‘The Man Who Sold The World’ and other classics with producer Tony Visconti – before the pair invited fans at one of the shows to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to him down the phone, just days before he died.

“We’d done a live album at Shepherd’s Bush Empire and Tony said ‘I’m going to play this to David because he kept asking how’s it going’,” Woody told NME. “He said it was really nice, he was beaming from ear to ear, all the way through the album and said he really liked it. Tony said ‘David and I have talked over the years about how we should’ve taken ‘The Man Who Sold the World ‘on the road as a live thing’ because when we finished it we really thought we were gonna set the world on fire, we’d thrown everything we had into that album and never toured it, we did a couple of tracks from it on the Ziggy tours but never in its entirety.

“I wasn’t sure Tony would be into but he immediately said yes and apparently David said ‘Why do you want to do it?’, then Tony replied ‘because we never did it’, and Bowie said ‘I can’t think of a better reason really’. So it was good and when we spoke to him from the stage. It was two days before he died. Tony knew he was ill, but didn’t know how severe it was, didn’t know he was near the end, and I don’t think David knew either. I think that last album was his last musical thing for the fans, I don’t think that was in his mind, I think he had more stuff he wanted to do. But it was a nice ending to it really.”